Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

like telling a hunchback that his hump was a blessing disguised. Hugo was always aware of the fact that her words connoted some latent evil in his nature.

The motif grew in Mrs. Danner’s thoughts until she sought a definite outlet for it. One day she led her child to a keg filled with sand. “All of us,” she said to her son, “have to carry a burden through life. One of your burdens will be your strength. But that might can make right. See that little keg?”

“Mmmmm.”

“That keg is temptation. Can you say it?”

“Temshun.”

“Every day in your life you must bear temptation and throw it from you. Can you bear it?”

“Huh?”

“Can you pick up that keg, Hugo?”

He lifted it in his chubby arms. “Now take it to the barn and back,” his mother directed. Manfully he walked with the keg to the barn and back. He felt a little silly and resentful. “Now⁠—throw temptation as far away from you as you can.”

Mrs. Danner gasped. The distance he threw the keg was frightening.

“You musn’t throw it so far, Hugo,” she said, forgetting her allegory for an instant.

“You said as far as I can. I can throw it farther, too, if I wanna.”

“No. Just throw it a little way. When you throw it far, it doesn’t look right. Now⁠—fill it up with sand, and we’ll do it over.”

Hugo was perplexed. A vague wish to weep occupied him as he filled the keg. The lesson was repeated. Mrs. Danner had excellent Sunday-school instincts, even if she had no real comprehension of ethics. Some days later the burden of temptation was exhibited, in all its dramatic passages, to Mrs. Nolan and another lady. Again Hugo was resentful and again he felt absurd. When he threw the keg, it broke.

“My!” Mrs. Nolan said in a startled tone.

“How awful!” the other woman murmured. “And he’s just a child.”

That made Hugo suddenly angry and he jumped. The woman screamed. Mrs. Nolan ran to tell whomever she could find. Mrs. Danner whipped her son and he cried softly.

Abednego Danner left the discipline of his son to his wife. He watched the child almost furtively. When Hugo was five, Mr. Danner taught him to read. It was a laborious process and required an entire winter. But Hugo emerged with a new world open to him⁠—a world which he attacked with interest. No one bothered him when he read. He could be found often on sunny days, when other children were playing, prone on the floor, puzzling out sentences in the books of the family library and trying to catch their significance. During his fifth year he was not allowed to play with other children. The neighbourhood insisted on that.

With the busybodyness and contrariness of their kind the same neighbours insisted that Hugo be sent to school in the following fall. When, on the opening day, he did not appear, the truant officer called for him. Hugo heard the conversation between the officer and his mother. He was frightened. He vowed to himself that his abnormality should be hidden deeply.

After that he was dropped into that microcosm of human life to which so little attention is paid by adults. School frightened and excited Hugo. For one thing, there were girls in school⁠—and Hugo knew nothing about them except that they were different from himself. There were teachers⁠—and they made one work, whether one wished to work or not. They represented power, as a jailer represents power. The children feared teachers. Hugo feared them.

But the lesson of Hugo’s first six years was fairly well planted. He blushingly ignored the direct questions of those children whom his fame had reached. He gave no reason to anyone for suspecting him of abnormality. He became so familiar to his comrades that their curiosity gradually vanished. He would not play games with them⁠—his mother had forbidden that. But he talked to them and was as friendly as they allowed him to be. His sensitiveness and fear of ridicule made him a voracious student. He liked books. He liked to know things and to learn them.

Thus, bound by the conditionings of his babyhood, he reached the spring of his first year in school without accident. Such tranquillity could not long endure. The day which his mother had dreaded ultimately arrived. A lanky farmer’s son, older than the other children in the first grade, chose a particularly quiet and balmy recess period to plague little Hugo. The farmer’s boy was, because of his size, the bully and the leader of all the other boys. He had not troubled himself to resent Hugo’s exclusiveness or Hugo’s reputation until that morning when he found himself without occupation. Hugo was sitting in the sun, his dark eyes staring a little sadly over the laughing, rioting children.

The boy approached him. “Hello, strong man.” He was shrewd enough to make his voice so loud as to be generally audible. Hugo looked both harmless and slightly pathetic.

“I’m not a strong man.”

“Course you’re not. But everybody thinks you are⁠—except me. I’m not afraid of you.”

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me. I’m not afraid of you, either.”

“Oh, you aren’t, huh? Look.” He touched Hugo’s chest with his finger, and when Hugo looked down, the boy lifted his finger into Hugo’s face.

“Go away and let me alone.”

The tormentor laughed. “Ever see a fish this long?”

His hands indicated a small fish. Involuntarily Hugo looked at them. The hands flew apart and slapped him smartly. Several of the children had stopped their play to watch. The first insult made them giggle. The second brought a titter from Anna Blake, and Hugo noticed that. Anna Blake was a little girl with curly golden hair and blue eyes. Secretly Hugo admired her and was drawn to her. When she laughed, he felt a dismal loneliness, a sudden desertion. The farmer’s boy pressed the occasion his meanness had made.

“I’ll bet you ain’t even strong enough to fight little Charlie Todd. Commere, Charlie.”

“I am,” Hugo replied with slow dignity.

“You’re a sissy. You’re a-scared to play with us.”

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